It’s been weeks since Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned moon mission, entered the lunar orbit flawlessly, and now its the turn of United Kingdom. With the aim to study the phenomenon of mysterious moonquakes Britain is all geared up to unveil its maiden moon mission. 

A 100-million-pound unmanned mission, named ‘MoonLITE’ is being launched with the motive to better know the reasons behind the mysterious quakes that vibrate through the lunar rock. 

A report published in a well known UK based newspaper, said, “The launch of Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecommunications Experiment or MoonLITE, will be announced by science minister Lord Drayson next month after which engineers would work on the technical designs with an aim to launch the satellite between 2012 and 2014.” 

The spacecraft, which would be backed by NASA, will also explore the chemical composition of the rocks and also search for water on the surface of the moon. 

The scientists have been quite surprised to learn that moon suffers quakes, since the moon does not have the tectonic plate activity that causes quakes on the earth. 

Ian Crawford, from the school of Earth sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, was quoted as saying, “The moon still holds an awful lot of secrets. Most of what we know about the moon is from a relatively small area on the nearside of the moon and we have no samples or data from the far side.”

Crawford was one of the scientist who originally proposed the idea of MoonLITE. The mission would fire four suitcase-sized penetrator probes into different points around the lunar surface.